Popular and influential musical lyrics are just as powerful as any well-known poem by literary heroes such as Robert Frost or William Shakespeare. If Don Mclean can portray a life story in the song "American Pie" in less than 10 minutes while being accompanied by beautiful and spine-chilling musical chords, an analysis of his song is beyond well-deserved. Songs like this that are known by students are more appealing and create an eager attitude to learn. The songs contain imagery, figurative language, extensive metaphors, and many other examples of important literature. With the literary composition that many songs contain, an English class is incomplete without a proper outlook on the chosen examples. Many musical and lyrical geniuses have been born into this world and it would be unfair to the students to not allow them to be enlightened on many generations of pure poetry in disguise.
Some may argue that popular music is too vulgar to be analyzed in such a manner. A great portion of our generation's music is improper. The people that make this argument don't realize that there are just as many provocative short stories and poems as popular songs. A book on musical lyrics that a college English class would study would not contain the extremely offensive examples just as the books used in classes today do not contain the obscene poetry that has been written. .
There are poems written by Edgar Allen Poe that are so obscene and descriptive about death that any normal adolescent who read it would be scarred for life; however, it doesn't contain a "Parental Advisory" warning. On the other hand, a Marilyn Manson or Emenim album that contains similar lyrics has a sociological view as unacceptable because it contains drug-related material; therefore, it does contain a warning. If compared, it is unarguable that death is much scarier than drug-related material to any child but if a parent was asked who they would rather their child be interested in, Poe would be the obvious choice.